gCube Website

Virtual Research Environments

Breadcrumbs

Virtual Research Environments

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are innovative, web-based, community-oriented, comprehensive, flexible, and secureworking environments conceived to serve the needs of modern science.

From the end-user perspective these environments are perceived as domain-specific and integrated applications providing them with the entire spectrum of resources they need, including datasets and cutting-edge services.

From the management perspective these environments are defined and operated by relying on the underlying HDI and its services, i.e. hardware, data, software and service resources needed to implement the VRE are dynamically acquired from the infrastructure offering.

The administration of these collaborative environments is a four tasks activity envisaging:

a definition phase in which a user having the role of VRE Designer specifies the characteristics of a new VRE conceived to serve an application scenario;

an approval phase in which a user having the role of VRE Manager decides whether the specified VREs have to be accepted or rejected. For what is concerned with the accepted VRE, the VRE Manager decides also how this VRE has to be deployed, e.g. which hosting nodes will be exploited;

a verification phase in which a user having the role of VRE Manager validates a VRE resulting from the approval phase;

a management phase in which a user having the role of VRE Manager operates on a deployed VRE in order to customise specific aspects (e.g. the layout governing the placement of user interfaces constituents a.k.a. portlets) or monitor the operational state of the VRE as a whole.